"The procedure now chosen gives the proponents of Chat Control a significant tactical advantage. Since the law is in its second reading, an absolute majority of 361 votes of all parliament members is required for amendments or a renewed rejection on Thursday. In contrast, a simple majority of the MEPs present is sufficient for the other side. As many parliamentarians have historically already departed by the last day before the summer break, the re-enactment of the regulation is considered almost unavoidable."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU.
Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny.
> So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control [2.0, implied] is bound to become law?
Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad.
This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it.
This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already.
One of reasons the the EU exists is so domestic prime ministers can deflect blame and say "not me, it was them over there in the EU parliament and my hands are tied"
In Germany it's usually the other way around: the EU tries to force us to do objectively good things, while national and regional governments drag their feet implementing EU law or complying with regulations. We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU, and every time it's for something where the EU seems clearly on the morally right side
And all that despite our government's best efforts to send their worst politicians to represent us in the EU. Describing von der Leyen as a disgraced politician who just failed upwards would not be entirely inaccurate
Germany is one of most wealthy, powerful and biggest contributors to the EU budget. They can't be bullied round easily.
"We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU"
The state controls the media... a lot of headlines are orchestrated. But it is done so well, unless you know, you don't know...
Where Germany doesn't agree, it has sway. Where Germany and France don't agree, it is unlikely, and where Germany, France and Italy don't agree it's not going to happen as some countries matter more than others.
Sure, but all of those used to be true of the UK too back when they were in the EU, and yet they had the good cop/bad cop roles swapped compared to Germany
The EU is a dictatorship for some time already. The fact they push and push and push unpopular laws until they push them through is all you need to know about them.
They sneaked this atrocity in while all the EU-controlled media hype the football championship and blame Trump and FIFA boss Infantino for overriding a decision on whether a single player will play a single game or not.
It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
> Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.
You think the UK is influenced by backroom dealing and not just the fact that they want to trade with the single market, which is the whole point of banding together as the EU?
The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints.
This is for proposing legislation, not fixing local quality of life issues, and the success rate has been rather poor. China’s system has a broad scale, but is directed at local problems and has a very high success rate.
As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption.
The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them.
This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving.
Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.
uhm, the will of the people is often already half-lost with the politicians/parties they directly elect, so I would hardly consider another layer of representative "demo"cracy on top of another layer of representative democracy following the will of the people at all.
But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I probably should have just written a criticism of the system.
Yup, edited to clarify I mean the MEPs bring “the will of the people”. Clearly not enough has happened on local level to raise awareness / lobby against chat control. I don’t think many outside tech are even aware if the slippery slope of the surveillance machinery.
So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.
All votes have a certain margin or fluctuation, as individual representatives can be pressured, swayed, or coerced by any number of means. If a vote fails over and over again then eventually passes under dubious circumstances (start of vacation when attention is elsewhere), that seems to be against the spirit of democratic rule. At least to me, but what do I know? Maybe everyone loves this outcome and all the prior rejections were just a fluke.
The vast majority (72%) of European citizens are opposed to Chat control. Regardless, the proposal has been brought up and rejected relentlessly, mostly by action of politicians (commissioners) who are not directly elected to begin with. We have more than enough reasons to be furious.
“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
And
“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”
And the worse part is: they do that because the alternative means you're building a railway on a surface tunnel because some people don't like it (or worse, not building anything)
Even if you are not in the EU, this will affect you. Some countries really like to copy such regulations from others. Once services starts complying, other governments will go like "if you did for them, you can do it for us, right? so it's not technically impossible", and things only get worse from there. Not all services will simply block the EU as well, which would be better to send a stronger message if approved.
Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.
In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)
> Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.
Very much. I also fear they coming for this, we already have instances of where using secure alternatives tags you as a criminal[0], so i don't doubt a future where non-approved applications will get you in trouble. With everything happening around Android locking itself down[1] and Windows being a spyware[2] anybody who wants privacy will be 'different', and can be tagged and excluded from parts of society for not using the same services.
This is why you should be building parallel networks and even institutions, as the Czechs did under Soviet rule (look up “Parallel Polis”). Mutual aid will become critical.
The trouble is that most conventional ways of building a new service are trivial to block. What is needed now is unstoppable messaging and social networking built on top of existing services and protocols that won't be blocked right away, services with more legal protection - like email with GPG, or some kind of steganographically encrypted layer on top of Instagram.
Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent
I am speaking beyond services, you need allies who are willing to come to each other’s aid, especially financially, but also for things like physically relaying data from place to place if that is ever needed. And for more mundane things like watching your house when you are out of town. Offline networks are going to become much more critical.
I wish you were right, but the EU only needs Google and Apple, both having big EU businesses, to block Signal.
Google is already working on closing the possibility to install apps from outside the app store, Apple has been like that since forever. The fact that a few technically savvy users with rooted phones will still be able to use Signal doesn't mean anything. It will be dead if the EU decides they don't want it.
All new laws should be given a trial period where the lawmakers are forced to live with them for 90 days before the public is subjected to them. At any time during that period lawmakers can change their vote.
No one will do anything to stop it, nor ChatControl 2.0 in the future. No one will revolt, or seize the government in response to anything that happens.
The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.
In your doomed reality maybe, but in this reality it was already stopped a couple of times and chances are good, that it will be stopped again - unless people believe all is doomed.
> I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.
Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.
In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."
First they tried to approve software patents during an agriculture and fisheries council session, now they are bending procedural rules to hack it in before summer vacations. Some weird form of democracy™.
Part of me wants Chat Control to get passed so that there is more incentive for at least the tech literate to start using more decentralized messaging tools.
Reminder that EU institutions were designed from ground up to smother democracy:
- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no
- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.
The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?
Part of the confusion is that there are two things involved here; 'Chat Control 1', an existing (but expiring) derogation to the ePrivacy Directive which allows, but does not require, providers to scan messages. 'Chat Control 2', which you'll likely have heard more about, would _require_ providers to do this. The wiki article is quite poorly written and implies that 1 is an earlier version of 2, which isn't really the case.
It's probably line item 156/289 on some intern's list of things to check once a week and make sure it "looks good". Politicians engage in just as much publicity management as big corporations do.
UK already technically banned encryption, causing Apple to remove the encrypted cloud service for UK customers. Check UK's "Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)"
This is the anti-EU move but they simply don't understand that.
Authoritarian centralization efforts need to be fought Huang style - with an European twist - as we might be behind on a lot of axis but we "Didn't Wake Up a Loser".
China / US leadership must not be the carte-blanche to formalize whatever low bar in how we handle our own privacy; going straight for the "self own" I guess?
Sorry for prompt mode but I hope this is at least somewhat legible to fellow Europeans, if not please listen to antirez in original Italian or auto translated:
I hear quite a few tangents in there; the main one being: especially in EU we need to go "agentic". Don't wait for politics to do The Right Thing. They should play retrospective backup at best.
I'm thinking they might be actually thankful for having been provided vision / imagination.
Team up with the bureaucrats after the fact but don't listen to them too much - again - to Do The Right Thing. Especially when they are potentially infected by lobbyists...
FFS I hate this timeline; we really need to show up for real. Again and again and again and again...
The cypherpunks were right. Rights to encryption are only a part of what we need.
The other part is steganography, or hiding real messages within a innocuous anodyne message stream. And encryption can be used in conjunction as part of hiding said messages.
It can be within pictures with the lowest bit values. It can be constructed punctuation and spaces. Lots of things.
But hidden and plausibly deniable messaging is the ONLY way to defeat a government(s) that want to invade every communication aspect for humans.
The trouble with pictures is that when you share them online the platform will likely compress them before serving them to others, spoiling your steganography. I think text-in-text is the way to go. Decrypt that recipe for brownies into the actual message. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075
One can host their own private or semi-private forum, chat server, chan board, etc... and choose not to re-encode the images and/or permit .tar .7z .zip archives and so on. Keep the bots away with basic auth to minimize skiddie risk to platform RCE's.
It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are temporarily offline. Get people used to the idea that is the place to share things they do not want leaked when the big platform 3rd parties expose files. The admin can encrypt the storage and periodically zero out files and zero out empty space for privacy.
People with slightly higher opsec may choose to block mobile proprietary devices.
What I don't understand is, what kind of legitimate criminal would not use such techniques? Are bank robbers planning things out on iMessage? If so, presumably they won't be criminals for very long. Therefore these types of initiatives only impact the innocent and inept but still active criminals.
The purpose of these efforts is not to catch criminals, at least not primarily, it’s to map the spread of “dangerous” ideas and the networks behind them. In other words, to prevent effective political change.
Found a new problematic meme? Someone leaked a video of you taking a bribe? Someone published a photo of damage from a missile strike? Add it to the database of forbidden media and quickly track down the source.
They'll make sure to catch just enough criminals that when you say it's all bullshit some snooty waste of oxygen on HN can say "well akshually" and link you to some cherry picked news story that makes it all look like a good thing because they caught some small time house painter dumping waste paint in the sewer or nabbed someone for selling vapes to teenagers.
Security is the reason given to us since most of us are too trusting or dumb to look any further into it. It becomes clear security isn't what they're doing it for after giving it more than a few minutes of thought
i'm so tired of this bs, these elected people act as tsars, even when said NO they try again and again while employing shady tactics and there is no way of punishing these a**holes. Elections exist, but when same 35% (number taken out of butt, but point is - it's low) of people vote we get same sh*t who elects same sh*t to EU. And i don't know about other countries, but my country sends complete degenerates to EU, like litteraly degenerates.
Effect of law enforcement not doing their jobs. Chat Control is illegal in many countries including Germany and that includes preparation for the roll out. Just need a prosecutor with a spine.
i'm so tired of this bs, these elected people act as tsars, even when said NO they try again and again while employing shady tactics and there is no way of punishing these a*holes. Elections exist, but when same 35% (number taken out of butt, but point is - it's low) of people vote we get same sht who elects same sht to EU. And i don't know about other countries, but my country sends complete degenerates to EU, like litteraly degenerates.
Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.
When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.
The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.
I'm always astonished how democratic politicians willingly allow for tools which might be misused by a future undemocratic party.
I'm not a politician or some civil rights activist but I can see that. It's right there. We have a similar situation in Germany these days. We'll be giving more rights to the Federal Intelligence Service ( foreign intelligence) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic intelligence). Basically allowing them to act more offensive (or offensive at all).
We're one or two elections away from having fascists in the government again.
Is it already a conspiracy theory if I suspect them of doing that deliberately because I can't imagine them being stupid?
I am not a lawyer, but, as a Russian citizen, let me warn you. The very fact that your comment criticizing the EU regime, that you yourself admit could send you to jail, is online and not deleted by Thursday, makes it a "lasting crime". For lasting crimes, it does not matter that the regulation criminalizing the action or state of affairs was not in force when they started. What matters is that the condition defined as illegal (comment existing) is true when the regulation outlawing it is in force - i.e., that you did not cease and desist. Yes, this is a creative way authorities circumvent the ban on ex post facto laws - they say "it is not ex post facto".
Commented on Tuesday, deleted the comment on Wednesday, the regulation is enacted on Thursday => OK.
Commented on Tuesday, did not delete before Thursday => jail (and it does not matter that you can't delete it anymore because it has a reply).
Sarcasm of course, as Russian laws do not apply here.
It’s a good time to download the source code for software that allows locally encrypted messaging, particularly without central infrastructure.
Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be.
I love how your average EU left-leaning cybertistic who has less serotonin than Werther and yet thinks all their country needs is more 3rd world "refugees" acts upon a tiny modicum of difficulty or government control (which should not be read as me advocating for it, naturally)
> Any advice from free people of China on circumventing government restrictions and control?
You should look into what goes on WeChat
But anyway the Chinese has way more agency and way less qualms about using air-conditioner so let me make a guess on who's surviving the heat waves
Talked to a fellow European coworker recently and they seem very supportive of chat control and that it was necessary to stop "far right nationalism" and then I pressed on for them describe what it is and they got angry and refused to clarify. I think this is a good snapshot of where Europe is right now that chat controls have become politically weaponized and people who are supportive of it seem clueless as to what it actually is proposing.
Future looks very dim for EU as a whole, I'm glad I left it for America